Appeals Court Allows DOGE Access to Sensitive Data at Several Agencies

A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed teams affiliated with the Department of Government Efficiency to gain access to potentially sensitive data on millions of Americans, overruling a lower court that had blocked that access in February.

By a 2-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit granted the access to data stored at the Treasury Department, the Education Department and the Office of Personnel Management, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in a similar case in June involving Social Security data.

The decision cleared the way for teams put in place this year by Elon Musk to reclaim “high-level I.T. access” to government databases, Judge Julius N. Richardson wrote, over the objections of a number of labor unions who had sued, arguing the move violated federal privacy laws.

Writing for the majority, Judge Richardson said the circumstances of the case mirrored those in a lawsuit involving data that the Supreme Court had weighed as an emergency application this year. In an unsigned order in that case, the Supreme Court intervened to allow the DOGE analysts to continue sifting through the records “in order for those members to do their work.”

Besides sensitive financial data linked to Social Security benefits, the government regularly collects other information on residents such as addresses, employer details and related statistics that could be used to identify individual people. The decision on Tuesday also concerned that kind of data, as well as information on student debt stored at the Education Department, which collects personal financial data on more than 40 million borrowers.

Judge Richardson, a Trump appointee, and Judge G. Steven Agee, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, formed the majority.

Over the course of multiple lawsuits, the Justice Department has argued that the DOGE teams were directed by President Trump to scrutinize federal data to screen for evidence of wasted taxpayers dollars, redundant contracts or fraud.

After several federal judges moved this year to restrict their access, the government offered a number of concessions, including agreeing to have DOGE staff undergo routine security trainings and background checks, or to limit their access to only anonymized data that could not be linked to individual people.

But as those cases have been appealed, the Supreme Court and appellate judges have more consistently sided with the government in allowing members of DOGE largely unfettered access to government systems.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Robert B. King, a Clinton appointee, echoed the concerns raised by the federal labor unions, including the lack of public information about DOGE’s operations and its unrestrained approach in seizing sensitive data.

Judge King wrote that a lower court’s reaction to the rapid-fire demands by DOGE was careful and reasonable, rejecting the suggestion in the majority’s opinion that it was overreaching.

“Just in early February 2025, the district court found itself confronted with this matter of immense urgency and import: the president’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or ‘DOGE,’ had been accorded sudden, unfettered, unprecedented and apparently unnecessary access to highly sensitive personal information belonging to millions of Americans,” he wrote.

Even after Mr. Musk stepped down from his role atop DOGE in May, the unit has continued to operate largely out of public view in what critics have described as a mission to hasten the downsizing of federal agencies and a reduction of the government’s services.